Frank Kogan

Actually, I kind of side with Frank on this one but also don't really care -- that is, there are LOTS of examples of value-laden, perhaps contentious, Wikipedia entries that depend on a community (usually academic) to provide deeply enriching content, some of it up for debate (and often these wiki entries will summarize opposing or different standpoints fairly, too). Emily told me something about Perseus, a Classics database, being largely responsible for the entries on Greek and Roman mythology, many of which are excellent and provocative. (With this stuff we're somewhere between Ashlee and the Alamo, I think.)

I suspect that the failure of music conversation taking root in Wikipedia is probably as random or non-random (no idea which) as the failure of music conversation taking root in academia: whereas, e.g., film studies has found an interesting interdisciplinary way to define itself somewhere in the intersection of humanities studies and cultural studies and has been (perhaps arbitrarily) guided by debates predating their entrance into film studies in feminism and psychoanalysis and semiotics. Music, on the other hand, always seems to be appropriated into its other disciplines: instead of bringing the disciplines to it, it offers itself to the disciplines and the more holistic and "inside" conversation -- the ones that we tend to have -- exist as, at best, decently-compensated career anomalies (in music journalism, say) and more frequently as more of a hobby pursuit.

Which is all a longwinded way of saying that as long as the Great Pop Conversation wanders without the grounding Holy Land of an academia or some other general funding structure, you're just never going to concentrate that kind of collective energy into translating the many debates and perspectives and opinions into a centralized site (Allmusic is the closest, but it's doing something slightly different; it's more of an expansive review site with a uniquely large roster than a place for collective understanding -- e.g. we can't go back and school Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Ashlee to try to shift the site's working knowledge of her.)

Pop criticism, especially as it manifests online, is in some ways closer to an oral tradition, one carried in the memories and activities of its most active participants, than something that can be easily databased. Of course the Pop Convo isn't inherently like this (film studies is a strong counter-example) -- that just seems to be the way things have turned out for it.